Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday May 15, 2014 @03:35PM
from the and-this-time-next-year dept.

MojoKid (1002251) writes "OCZ was recently acquired by Toshiba and has been going through its product stack, revamping its SSD portfolio with fresh re-designs based on Toshiba NAND Flash memory for not only increased performance but better cost structure as well. OCZ has now replaced their RevoDrive family of PCIe SSD cards with an almost complete re-designed of the product. The RevoDrive 350 is based on the same OCZ VCA 2.0 (Virtualized Controller Architecture) technology as the previous generation but is now enabled with a PCI Express X8 card interface and up to 4 LSI SandForce SD-2282 SSD processors, along with 19nm Toshiba NAND Flash. The good news is, not only is the new RevoDrive 350 faster at 1.8GB/sec claimed bandwidth for sequential reads and 1.7GB/sec for sequential writes, but it's also significantly more affordable, at literally half the price of the previous gen RevoDrive 3 when it first launched. In the benchmarks, the new PCIe card excels at read throughput, regularly hitting its 1.8GB/sec claimed bandwidth, especially with sequential workloads. Write performance is solid as well and the drive competes with the likes of some higher-end and more expensive SLC NAND-based PCIe cards like LSI's WarpDrive and Intel's SSD 910."

Unless the unit was damaged, modified or some grey market edition I don't know that they have a legal leg to stand on, you can file a complaint with the state attorneys generals office allege fraud for failing to honor the warranty. It also depends on what state you're in i.e. "Void where prohibited" since some states have stronger consumer protection laws than others and some of the warranty terms may not apply to you.

I, on the other hand, have had terrible experience with Toshiba's US support department.

I live in Canada, and wanted to buy a model of Toshiba laptop that was only available in the US. Their warranty claimed to be international, and I called Toshiba USA to confirm this. At worst, I was told, I'd have to pay the shipping costs myself. I was fine with that.

Then I dropped the laptop. It was fine electronically, it was just that a chunk was missing from the chassis, so I needed to replace some parts of the laptop chassis.

I called Toshiba USA. They refused to have anything to do with me, saying that not only could they not ship the laptop back to me at my expense, they couldn't even RECEIVE the laptop at their repair centre. Their shipping department would refuse to accept any shipment from outside the country. They told me my only solution was to mail my laptop to somebody in the US and have *THEM* send it to Toshiba. Mind you this laptop was only a few months old, only a few months into a 3-year warranty.

I called Toshiba Canada. They refused to repair the laptop (at my cost) even though by then they sold the same laptop in Canada as my American model. They said that because the model numbers were different (even if the laptops were identical) they wouldn't touch it.

Because of this, the only way that I could get my laptop repaired was to mail it to one of Toshiba's authorized third-party repair companies in the US. In the end, I had to pay $600 to repair a $1200 laptop... even though only the chassis (which probably costs a few dollars at most) was broken, with all electronics perfectly fine.

To rub salt in the wound, they did a terrible repair job, violating Toshiba's own service manual, and incorrectly re-installed the keyboard.

As a result, I will never buy another Toshiba product, nor will I ever recommend anyone buy one. Considering that many of my friends have already been burned by OCZ, them being bought by Toshiba changes my recommendation to "Don't buy OCZ products because they have a super high failure rate and Toshiba will try to screw you over on replacements."

On the other hand I have had excellent service from Toshiba. My TV wouldn't take a firmware update so they collected it, fixed it and returned it quickly and at no cost to me. It was about 18 months old at the time, no problem with the mandatory 2 year warranty that some companies like to quibble over.

Years ago when I used to fix laptops for a living they were good on parts and warranty repairs too. It seems like your slightly unusual situation is what caused problems. Of course that is no help to you, but

Actually, they are legally required to honour it. Part of buying the company is that you end up in all the contracts that the old company was in, and you absolutely must honour them. You can't get out of contracts you have with people simply by setting up a new company, and buying your old one out with it.

Warranty holders are creditors. OCZ Technology Group went bankrupt, and Toshiba bought OCZ's assets after that. Toshiba then launched a new company named OCZ Storage Solutions.

In other words, OCZ's assets were liquidated, and some creditors got paid. After that, OCZ the original company didn't exist anymore, and the warranties were worthless. Toshiba theoretically decided to honour some (but not all) warranties, but they were not obligated to do so.

OCZ probably had no legal leg to stand on, but Toshiba is not legally required to honour OCZ's warranties, even though they bought the company.

Sometimes that sort of thing is a condition of a merger. Remember, corporations are supposed to function in the public interest. Are you in fact sure that Toshiba is not legally required to honor OCZ's warranties?

They didn't merge, and Toshiba didn't actually buy OCZ. They only bought the *assets* of OCZ. OCZ the company went bankrupt and was liquidated, so OCZ's warranties died when the company ceased to exist.

As a result, Toshiba had no obligation to honour any warranties. Indeed, they did cancel all existing OCZ warranties except high-end SSDs.

The ACCC a few years back put in a new law (which Apple fought tooth and nail, source: http://www.afr.com/p/technolog... [afr.com]) which required every piece of electronics sold in Australia to have a two year "warranty". I put that in sarcasm quotes not because it's invalid (the ACCC has some *serious* bite here, enough to scare Apple into compliance), but because it's not technically a warranty. It's simply: "a reasonable expectation that an electronic product will be fit fo

The ACCC a few years back put in a new law (which Apple fought tooth and nail, source: http://www.afr.com/p/technolog [afr.com]... [afr.com]) which required every piece of electronics sold in Australia to have a two year "warranty". I put that in sarcasm quotes not because it's invalid (the ACCC has some *serious* bite here, enough to scare Apple into compliance), but because it's not technically a warranty. It's simply: "a reasonable expectation that an electronic product will be fit for purpose for two years from p

OCZ always struggles with reliability, and buying their Lambo performance hardware always seems like a recipe for lost data. The fact that they're pushing MLC flash chips to the limit is not reassuring.

Out of three OCZ drives I have had two failures within the first two weeks of use.

Last Friday my 2-week old work machine with an "enterprise class" OCZ hard drive hooked up to a Dell server with an LSI raid controller suddenly started corrupting the EXT4 filesystem all to hell rendering the machine unbootable. I had days worth of work on that machine. Fortunately I was able to recover the data from lost+found after fsck.ext4 but the root directory was totally lost along with who knows what other data.

At home I have two OCZ hard drives. One of them turned into a brick after two weeks of use. I got a replacement from OCZ and make sure I do an XFS dump every night onto my RAID drives.

That sounds about par for the course. Before the brand was purchased, they saw a 5% return rate across all of their drives, as high as 15% for specific models. What junk. I was shocked when I heard that they had been bought and rolled in to another company. It's going to be hard to overcome that kind of terrible reputation. There's a reason why no OEMs include OCZ drives in their offerings.

>Out of three OCZ drives I have had two failures within the first two weeks of use.

Out of six OCZ SSDs, I've never had a single failure. They've only gone out of service when replaced by larger drives as they became affordable.
They seem to be fine in my environment, but I'm not pulling power cords out while the PC is on.

Another poster claims that ocz had an average return rate of 5%. Some people don't return their drives because they value their privacy more than the cost of the drives or because they can't be bothered with the effort of returning them and some drives fail after the warranty runs out but before they are too small to be useful so lets suppose the overall proportion of drives has a 20% rate of "failure before becoming too small to be usable". Lets also assume that failures are independent events.

Yeah lets assume that 3/4ths of failures go unreported on drives that most people installed themselves. Its not like these are drives that came in their Dells or Acers. Most of these drives were installed by the people who own the computer or someone in a IT department. I doubt these 3/4th of these kinda people would no go to the trouble to replaces their expensive (compared to a HDD of much greater capacity they could have got) of equipment.

Ah, the silent majority argument which normally only pollutes political discussions. It falls down when you consider that it should also apply to spinning storage.As for the additional numerology on a flawed premise - it's depressing to watch.

It was the 3.11 kernel (OpenSuSE 13.1 with all the up-to-date patches). Normally I run XFS which for me has always been rock solid and extremely stable and reliable (even in cases where I had major issues occur with RAID). I have NEVER had a single issue with XFS and I have been running it for years. The tools for it are top-notch which is the main reason I run it. I also usually back up my systems. Since it was the only drive in the system and only 250GB I did not separate/home from root. Fortunately afte

OCZ always struggles with reliability, and buying their Lambo performance hardware always seems like a recipe for lost data. The fact that they're pushing MLC flash chips to the limit is not reassuring.

Except you're assigning blame in the wrong place.

It is not MLC flash that's the problem. It's OCZ.

The problem with OCZ is they don't put data reliability first - they put speed first. So they compromised reliability for speed. One famous example is where the SandForce controller could run in two modes - a safe-but-slower mode where you don't need external power caps, and a fast-but-unsafe mode where you need power caps so it can dump the tables to flash on power off.

What did OCZ do? They did the fast mode without power caps. So remove power suddenly and the FTL tables get corrupted, losing your data. It's fast, though, and cheap (since you don't pay $$$ for caps), but boy is it a ticking time bomb.

Considering SATA-III limits are hit (or why every SSD is now the same speed), there's no need for performance - using that extra speed for safety is far better.

(It's also why we have PCIe SSDs, because SATA-III is now too slow, and it didn't take long for SSDs, once the standard was reached, to hit the max).

Seriously the XP941 is a native PCIe controller, not multiple SATA controllers raided together with a PCIe bridge controller. As a result, it is almost 1/2 the price, and still has similar performance (it is only a PCIe 1x device that does 1.2GBs reads/writes, vs the PCIe 4x device that only does 1.8GBs).

Seriously the XP941 is a native PCIe controller, not multiple SATA controllers raided together with a PCIe bridge controller. As a result, it is almost 1/2 the price, and still has similar performance (it is only a PCIe 1x device that does 1.2GBs reads/writes, vs the PCIe 4x device that only does 1.8GBs).

Seriously the XP941 is a native PCIe controller, not multiple SATA controllers raided together with a PCIe bridge controller. As a result, it is almost 1/2 the price, and still has similar performance (it is only a PCIe 1x device that does 1.2GBs reads/writes, vs the PCIe 4x device that only does 1.8GBs).

Pretty sure that it's a PCIe 2.0 x4 device.:)

To quote Mr Cole, "You can get more of what you want with a kind word and a bit of 2x4 than you can with just a kind word." B5.

Not that I'd recommend buying this SSD, but an SSD is in 99% of cases the largest tangible gain you can get in a computer. The fact that random reads (what slows down your system the vast amount of time) are 3 orders of magnitude faster than with a hard drive makes that the case in almost all cases.

Compilation: My Core i7 used only 2 cores while compiling reading off my HDD, it gets pegged to all 8 now, and compiles much much faster now.Booting: Not that you do it often, but booting a machine is near insta

Last week I lost an entire day due to an enterprise class OCZ drive that decided to corrupt itself. My Linux box (using EXT4) started suddenly developing all sorts of filesystem errors rendering the system unbootable. The machine was two weeks old and had been used for software development. I also had another OCZ drive suddenly fail after two weeks where the drive turned into a brick. Reading up online on the new drive returned many reports of corrupt data from an "enterprise" class drive.

Who cares how fast you can access the drive if the drive can turn into/dev/random or/dev/null without warning.

ZFS will also corrupt itself in situations where the drive lies about writes. Running ZFS with unreliable writes has the same properties as running without NVRAM-protected storage [oracle.com], which "can lead to data loss, application level corruption, or even pool corruption".

If one of your drives is lying about writes, but the others aren't, ZFS should still be fine. When you try to read back the block, the data from the "evil" drive will fail the checksum, and the data will be reconstructed from the other drives.

I have used over 16 OCZ drives and pushed them to their limits with no problems. Obviously all drives will eventually fail regardless of their nature, and you should always backup and use raid if uptime is important. Anyone using any drive without redundancy and backups should not affect your opinion of these drives.

The problem with many of OCZ's drives (like the Vertex2 and Agility2) was that traditional RAID wouldn't save you because whatever killed drive #1 could (and often did) kill one or more of your OTHER drives, too.

The fault lies 100% with OCZ. They omitted the supercapacitor that Sandforce's engineers intended to keep it powered up if it unexpectedly lost power during a write, and they compiled their drivers to NOT use the multi-step write strategy that a drive without backup power needed in order to write safely and recover gracefully from power loss (because multi-step writes killed performance).

The other big problem with traditional raid is it only saves you if the drive either dies or reports a sector as unreadable. If it just quietly returns the wrong data then traditional raid doesn't help. That is one of the big attractions of filesystems like zfs and btrfs that combine checksuming with redundancy at the same layer.

No, it's OCZ. ext4 is the most popular filesystem that expects good behavior from drive write caches, so of course it also has the most problem reports. The way write barriers work in ext4, the filesystem struggles when hardware lies about data being flushed to disk. See ext4 and data loss [lwn.net] for an introduction.

As outlined there, ext3 gets lucky in some situations ext4 just doesn't tolerate so some people see that as a bug in ext4. But the reason for the change is improved performance. You just can't get

They need to have a better DMI bus even the high end cpus with 40 pci-e 3.0 lanes use as well.

When you have a few pci-e 2.0 lanes + sound + network + firewire + usb + sata + other IO all on the that dmi bus that is only pci-e 2.0 X4 you are not going to get all that you can out of an pci-e ssd.

And the pci-e 3.0 lanes need to be more in the low-mid-to lower high end cpu's desktop 16 3.0 lanes some times spit to X8 X8 is to Little.

Some boards like to put usb 3.0 + TB and other stuff on the X16 line takeing it

Both the xeon high-end-gaming/workstation platform and the low to high end 9 series chipsets are for gaming, high-business desktop use. Put USB, networking, chipset IO, the few X1 slots all on the DMI bus.

Now maybe if there was a board that gave video X16 2.0 / X8 3.0 and used the other X8 3.0 for some pci-e sdd slots / maybe 1-2 pci-e X4 2.0 slots.

at least with the high end board you can have 2 full X16 3.0 slots + 8 3.0 leftover (per CPU). So them they can put pci-e 3.0 / switched 2.0 fr

The original IDE drive interface was nothing more than an extension of the ISA bus, the primary system device interconnect, over a 40 pin ribbon cable.

Huh? No, there certainly was a storage controller chip between the ISA bus and the HDD. The term Integrated Drive Electronics refers to the fact that the drive controller is integrated into the drive, thus abstracting away the need to control the R/W head by host software.

Huh? No, there certainly was a storage controller chip between the ISA bus and the HDD.

Huh? No, there certainly was no such thing on the cheapest ATA cards. You may not know this, but ATA has actually been around for a really long time, almost as long as 3.5" HDDs. It used to be fantastically expensive. The ATA bus is not identical to the ISA bus, but it's basically the same thing. The original ATA interface cards had very little hardware on them, and certainly no microcontroller. They just had some chips to interface between the ATA and ISA buses, which basically just handled address selecti

I am old enough to have dealt with the ISA "multi-IO" cards providing an IDE interface, but they were all the more modern variants with a Winbond chip, which lead to my incorrect conclusions. But yeah, as Penn Jillette has said, it's important to keep the discussion going and get each other caught of the bullshit we spread.;)

No one can argue that Fusion-io started the PCIe SSD market - many laughed and now many are competing. I won't say they are the best for the price, but Tom's hardware is misleading people when they compare OCZ against 5 year old hardware. The 160gb iodrive is the original product that FIO launched with. Still a good product, but that is like comparing the top of the line pentium with today's CPUs.

There was a Wikipedia user called MojoKid HH [wikipedia.org] who created the HotHardware wiki article. Coincidence? Who are we kidding. HotHardware is not affiliated with Dice - it seems we just have a single person trying to drum up some traffic for their website. MojoKid's wiki user page contains comments he's made which refer to HotHardware as "us", meaning he's at least affiliated with the site. I know Slashdot has gone down the pan recently, but this is not Dice's doing.

We had an OCZ drive fail at work and kill the iMac it was installed in.

Yes, KILL. The machine would no longer power up at all.

At that moment we didn't know it was drive's fault, so we moved the drive to a different iMac. (These are older iMacs, out of warranty.)

*POP* a second dead iMac.

I will NEVER buy an OCZ product as long as I live. I don't know how the heck the drive killed the machine, and I have no easy way to find out. Maybe I'll sacrifice an ancient PC to see if the drive kills it as well.